Alice Moore, a scion of Black society and a longtime educator in West Palm Beach, walked with a newspaper reporter in 1980 searching for her family’s plot at Evergreen Cemetery, the original segregated resting place for many of the city’s pioneers.
As they walked, Moore was aghast to see the grave of Molly Holt, grandmother of Gwen Cherry, the first Black female Florida legislator, had been vandalized — her casket not only exposed, its glass top shattered, but it was empty.
Moore did find her adoptive father, Haley Mickens (1874-1950), a successful businessman.
But it was as if the testament to her father’s life had vanished. His gravesite was overgrown with weeds.
That loss, excruciating for Moore, deprives the city of its rich history. But it might not be permanent.
Nearly a half-century later, city commissioners have voted to find out who is buried at Evergreen and where they lie amid the 1,600 plots on 9 acres at 27th Street and Rosemary Avenue. No remains will be excavated.
But a visit to the city-owned cemetery shows that many gravestones are in poor shape, some sinking into the ground, making it impossible to see names.
The consultant, Community Planning Collaborative of Jacksonville, told commissioners Aug. 4 that it plans to inventory the markers and who is buried there. CPC also will dig into the sparse cemetery records and other documents and tap the stories of families and residents to help determine recommendations for maintaining the cemetery long-term.
It’s an effort to save history before the final resting places of several of the city’s pioneers have disappeared.
Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Bradley Harper is descended from one of the cemetery’s founders.
“Although the people who are there are dead and gone, the cemetery reflects the history and an important part of the fabric of the city,” he said.
White-only cemetery forced creation of Evergreen
The historic, segregated Northwest and Pleasant City neighborhoods, just south of Evergreen, began to thrive in the early 1900s after E.R. Bradley cleared out the Styx, an encampment on Palm Beach of Black laborers who traveled from the North to build Henry Flagler’s Royal Poinciana Hotel.
Prominent, wealthy residents in the neighborhoods, ranging from tradesmen to professionals and developers, built churches, businesses, a hospital and nightclubs.
They owned land and stately homes as well as shotgun houses built in African-American tradition with two to four rooms in which each room opens directly into the next with no hallways.
They also were forced to establish their own cemetery.
A group of private residents in 1913 pooled their money to buy land and plotted it for gravesites after the city barred Black people from burial at the city-owned Woodlawn Cemetery, which is across the street from the Norton Museum of Art. Woodlawn would not be integrated for 50 years.
Evergreen’s entrance is tucked away amid an industrial district in northern West Palm Beach. Nearby, at 25th Street and Tamarind Avenue, is the mass grave where 674 Black people, chiefly from the Glades, were dumped after the devastating 1928 hurricane.
Prominent families buried at Evergreen
Today, the cemetery is mowed, but a few crypts are crumbling or appear to be vandalized. Many of the above-ground sarcophagi have lost their nameplates, leaving the identities of who is buried there a mystery.
Henry Harper, the judge’s father, said during a walk-through with a reporter that some folks couldn’t afford granite or marble and had to choose concrete. Mold grows over many.
Many Black pioneers are reportedly buried at Evergreen, some in unmarked graves and some hard to find because there is no map. Among them:
The first Black doctor
Dr. Thomas Leroy Jefferson (1867-1939), the first Black doctor in West Palm Beach. Jefferson was known as the “bicycle doctor” as he pedaled from house call to house call, puffing on the ever-present cigars that he bought from a factory next door to his practice on Olive Avenue.
Jefferson, born in Mississippi, earned his medical degree in Nashville. He and his first wife, Georgia, moved to West Palm late in the 19th century. Jefferson reportedly treated residents of the Styx in 1900.
The tall, thin, quiet healer also was a businessman and opened a drugstore at Clematis Street and Rosemary Avenue.
Jefferson’s son-in-law, Carl Robinson, told Post columnist Bill McGoun in 1977 that Jefferson abhorred debt. He paid cash for cars. He retired at age 60 but lost his fortune in the stock market crash two years later. So he took up medicine again.
He continued until September 1939 when he was admitted to Pine Ridge Hospital to have his appendix removed. It’s not clear what went wrong, but he died three days later, according to a Palm Beach Post story. The hospital during segregation was the only one that served Black people for five counties.
Today, the T. Leroy Jefferson Medical Society continues to provide medical care to under-resourced residents.
A restored headstone of Ethyl Jefferson (1891-1922), whom he married in 1915, can be seen by visitors, but her husband’s grave is not marked.
Cemetery co-founder
Co-founder M. Jacob Gildersleeve (1857-1931) was the great-great-great grandfather of Bradley Harper, the first Black elected county judge in Palm Beach County.
Gildersleeve, president of the original Evergreen Cemetery Association, grew strawberries and pineapples on his farm in Riviera Beach and sold his fruit and vegetables at the foot of the Flagler Memorial Bridge in West Palm Beach.
He was married to Millie (1858-1950), a freed slave and the first midwife in the area, who was inducted into the Florida Women’s Hall of Fame in 2019.
She may have been the first Black resident of the area. She was born in Georgia and came here in 1876. Jacob grew up in Alachua County.
Millie traveled to what was known as the Lake Worth region with Elisha Newton “Cap” Dimick, who opened the first hotel in Palm Beach. She and Jacob were married on Dimick’s Palm Beach lawn, and Dimick sold them five waterfront acres in what is now Riviera Beach.
Their graves, along with those of some of their children, lie under a sabal palm in the southwest corner of the cemetery. Their names are mostly visible, but the gravestone is sinking. Millie’s name would be the first to slip below ground.
Bradley Harper says he has visited his family’s graves throughout the years and even worked with his son to develop a geocache site as a history lesson for the cemetery.
Wealthy builder, real estate salesman
Henry Speed (1874-1937) arrived in 1897, building houses and selling lots. He amassed a fortune as a developer and insurer. He also was part owner of the city’s first Black lumber company.
He donated land for Palm View Elementary School (now U.B. Kinsey/Palmview) at 801 11th St. and Pine Ridge Hospital at 1401 Division Ave.
Though Speed attended school only through the fifth grade, his children went on to be leaders in education at several county schools, including Roosevelt High and Pleasant City Elementary.
At least eight of Speed’s family members are buried in Evergreen, according to a Post story.
His grave couldn‘t be found during a recent walk-through, but Moore spotted it in 1980.
Pioneer Black physician
Dr. Thomas R. Vickers (1879-1965) started a medical practice in 1912 on Rosemary Avenue, according to the Historical Society of Palm Beach County. Vickers was one of seven pioneer Black physicians in the city, and he focused on affordable care to the community.
He and his second wife, Alice (1914-96), lived in a house on Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard between Douglass and Division avenues. Alice was an opera singer.
“He was a right nice guy,” Alice recalled in a 1980 Post story. He performed many procedures, such as X-rays and tonsillectomies, for free, she said. Thomas also treated inmates — Black and white — at the jail. He had two sons with his first wife, Sadie (1887-1941), who is buried in a Washington, D.C., cemetery.
Thomas Vickers was named a Great Floridian by the Florida Department of State and the Florida League of Cities in 2000. The house on Palm Beach Lakes is the North Community Resource Center today.
Successful businessman
Moore’s father, Haley Mickens, made his money on Palm Beach running the pedal-pushing, wicker “wheelchairs,” as they were known, for tourists.
He and his wife, Alice (1888-1988), an esteemed educator for years, had hosted prominent Black figures such as Nobel Laureate Ralph Bunche, musician Count Basie and college founder and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune at their Fourth Street home.
The reason? No hotel would take them because they were Black.
Early educator
James W. Mickens (about 1876-1943), principal of Industrial High School, the first Black segregated school, on Division Avenue between Eighth and Ninth streets. Sources differ on when it opened, possibly as early as 1916.
J.W. was a stickler for punctuality for both students and teachers, believing it was a key to success. Those who were tardy were sent home.
He also was known for persistently raising money for Liberty Bonds during World War I.
Mickens’ wife, Anna, also is buried at Evergreen. She was a teacher at Industrial High and was born about 1880. It’s not clear when she died. It’s also unclear how or whether J.W. or Anna are related to Haley and Alice Mickens, who is buried at Royal Palm Memorial Gardens in West Palm Beach.
Many veterans from wars ranging from the Spanish-American to Vietnam are buried at Evergreen.
F. Malcolm Cunningham Jr., an attorney whose father opened the first Black law practice in West Palm Beach, remembers the remains of Black Vietnam vets returning home and being barred from burial at Woodlawn though it was integrated in 1966.
So “Evergreen was brought into service,” he said.
The Genealogical Society of Palm Beach County lists 293 burials at Evergreen, and Find a Grave, a free, online user-contributed database, identifies 533 though neither shows the presence of Dr. Jefferson, Henry Speed or Dr. Vickers.
Evergreen falls into disrepair
As the cemetery association dwindled in size in the late 1970s, maintenance became unaffordable and members implored the city to take over.
The cemetery had fallen into disrepair.
Trees and bushes poked up through crypts. Weeds took over, and no one mowed. Vandals destroyed graves, even robbed some of them.
In 1980, someone found a pile of bones along a path that ran through the cemetery.
The association’s lawyer that year pointed out that it was a problem of the city’s own making.
“They didn’t have any places to go,” attorney I.C. Smith told city commissioners. “Woodlawn Cemetery was a facility maintained for its white citizenry. … That’s a debt you owe to the citizens who lived here and worked here and paid their taxes to the city.
“Anything short of the city taking over is a spit back in Black people’s faces.”
But the city manager at the time warned commissioners that West Palm Beach could face liabilities because of poor recordkeeping. Only a few plot owners had filed deeds with the city.
Finally taking over the cemetery in 1987, the city reburied bones, paved a road throughout the grounds, installed lights and kept it mowed. Over the years, the city has installed a sprinkler system and erected a sign and historic marker at the entrance.
Mayor says he pushed for project
Even a decade later, though, grave markers were cracked, tilted or sunk into the ground, and crypts were ruined by vandals, The Post reported in 1997.
The cemetery today shows few signs of disrepair, but its history is fading.
In August, city commissioners voted to pay about $137,700 to a consultant that specializes in historic planning in African-American communities and preservation of cemeteries. Community Planning Collaborative LLC will search historical records, make a database of names and reach out to the community and families of those buried at Evergreen for their stories.
Mayor Keith James told commissioners in August that early in his term, there was discussion of spending more money on Woodlawn, but he felt Evergreen must come first.
“Consistent with my vision of making West Palm Beach a community of opportunity, I said, ‘We can’t move ahead on Woodlawn until we do something with this long-ignored Black cemetery,’” James said.
Still, the city refused to make any official or the consultant available for comment without questions in advance. The city also made it hard to get copies of the consultant’s contract and other documents provided to commissioners before they voted, initially demanding $216. After Stet News questioned the cost, the city provided the documents for free.
To get insight from residents, the city plans a community meeting next year, spokeswoman Kathleen Joy said. The city said it has invited community members to serve on a committee that will seek stories and other information but said it will not release any names until the kickoff meeting, which hasn’t been scheduled.
“We do not yet know what insights we will gain from the community, but we hope to capture as much of Evergreen’s history as possible, along with the stories of the families connected to it and their lasting influence on the community,” she said.
“To involve them would be a great thing,” Cunningham said. “It should be addressed by people interested in my community.
“There’s got to be equity here.”
This story was originally published by Stet News Palm Beach, a WLRN News partner.
